![]() That woman… was Isabel Briggs Myers… And her instrument was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. MERVE EMRE: she would show up to the office and work very, very, very late into the night, work into weekends, not stop to eat, and she worked as hard as she could in order to prove that she was as good as the men who were responsible for verifying her instrument. ETS just had to make sure it actually worked. What if you could hire not just the person with the best medical knowledge, but the person with the best personality to actually care for the sick? What if couples could figure out if they were compatible before they actually married the wrong person? What if you could raise every kid according to their unique temperament?Īnd this woman had just the thing to accomplish all of this: a questionnaire. A good personality test could revolutionize child care, marriage, work … Think about it. And in the 50s, they needed this woman, or so the boss said.īecause although they already dominated academic testing, ETS was ready to conquer new territory: personality testing. MERVE EMRE: They made fun of her behind her back and also to her face about her lack of formal training, about the fact that she wasn't an expert.ĮTS is the company that runs the SATs. Whereas the men of ETS had graduate degrees, many of them PhDs, this woman didn’t. Merve Emre is an English professor at the University of Oxford and the author of The Personality Brokers. MERVE EMRE: the men at ETS just despised her ![]() She was always drinking this homemade energy mix she called “tiger’s milk,” a blend of brewer’s yeast, milk, and hershey bars that she’d smash with her own fists (hence the sticky fingers).īehind her back, the employees of the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, called her "the little old lady in tennis shoes." Or just."that horrible woman." She’d walk the halls late at night, rifle through their papers, leave sticky fingerprints. Some of them even started requesting the day off when they knew she’d come around. But the service’s employees did not care for her. JOHANNA MAYER: In the late 1950s, a quirky older woman started turning up at the offices of the Educational Testing Service.
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